1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to automated material requirement programs and more particularly to an improved process that performs detail analysis of material requirements for high-level components that deviate significantly from historical trends.
2. Description of the Related Art
Materials requirements planning (MRP) tools are computerized automated applications that provide large corporations with purchasing information. Such MRP applications provide a detailed list of the number of components that the corporation must acquire in order to manufacture its products. The material requirement planning tools are very useful especially in high-technology products, each of which may contain thousands of individual components. Such applications coordinate the component needs for many diverse products, many of which may share components. In addition, such planning tools take into account component inventory and other sources of new and used components at the corporations disposal.
Once the material requirement planning is run, purchasing agents act on the component purchasing reports and place orders accordingly. In addition, many MRP applications place orders with suppliers automatically. Therefore, it is important that the MRP be accurate and free of errors. To insure the accuracy of the MRP, a simulation is often run before the actual MRP is preformed. The xe2x80x9cactualxe2x80x9d MRP causes orders to be placed, while the simulation does not. The MRP simulation is conventionally checked manually.
However, a problem exists in that the manual checking of the MRP simulation is extremely time intensive and error prone. Therefore, there is a need to automate the checking of the MRP simulation to decrease the consumption of human-resources required with manual checking, and to increase the accuracy and consistency of the checking process. The invention described below addresses these needs and provides an automated system to check the accuracy of the MRP simulation.
In view of the foregoing and other problems, disadvantages, and drawbacks of the conventional automated purchasing applications the present invention has been devised, and it is an object of the present invention to provide an automated system to check the accuracy of material requirement planning simulations.
In order to attain the objects suggested above, there is provided, according to one aspect of the invention, a method for using a materials requirements planning (MRP) tool which runs a simulation using the MRP tool for at least one preselected component to produce simulated order levels for the preselected component. The invention identifies deviations of the simulated order levels from the historical order levels for the preselected component. The invention then analyzes the MRP tool to determine whether the deviations are appropriate or are errors. Next, the invention corrects the MRP tool to correct for the errors and runs the MRP tool after the correcting is complete.
The invention also identifies high-level components and preferably performs the method only on high-level components. The critical components are components with a cost exceeding a predetermined percentage of the total cost of the product or are components which are uniquely used in a limited number of products. The deviations include a simulated order level that is above or below the historical order levels by at least a predetermined amount. The preselected component includes a plurality of different component and the identifying produces a listing of components that have the deviations. The historical order levels have amounts of the preselected components ordered in previous time periods.
Thus, with the invention, only those components that deviate from their historical purchasing history need to be analyzed manually. In addition, in one embodiment, the invention limits the automatic review to only high-level components. High-level components are those which have a relative cost that exceeds a predetermined percentage of the product being manufactured. Therefore, with the invention, manual analysis only occurs for high-level components that have an abnormal purchasing requirement which deviates significantly from historical purchasing requirements.